Come,
sail with me on a quiet pond.
The shores are shrouded,
the surface smooth.
We are vessels on the pond
and we are one with the pond.
A fine wake spreads
out behind us,
traveling throughout the misty waters.
Its subtle waves register our passage.
Your wave and mine coalesce,
they form a pattern that mirrors
your movement as well as mine.
As other vessels, who are also us,
sail the pond that is us as well,
their waves intersect with both of ours.
The pond's surface comes alive
with wave upon wave, ripple upon ripple.
They are the memory of our movement;
the traces of our being.
The waters whisper from you to me and from me to you,
and from both of us to all the others who sail the pond:
Our separateness is an illusion;
we are interconnected parts of the whole-
we are a pond with no movement and memory.
Our reality is larger than you and me,
and all the vessels that sail the waters,
and all the waters on which they sail.
~ Ervin Laszlo from 'Science and the
Akashic Field'
INDRA'S NET
There
is an endless net of threads throughout the Universe. The
horizontal threads are in space. The vertical threads in time.
At every crossing of threads there is an individual. And every
individual is a crystal bead. The great light of absolute
being illuminates and penetrates every crystal being. And
every crystal being reflects not only the light from every
other crystal in the net, But also every reflection of every
re-flection throughout the Universe.
~ from the Vedas of ancient India,
7000 years old
AN INTERPRETATION OF INDRA'S NET . . .
The metaphor of Indra's Jeweled Net is attributed to an ancient
Buddhist named Tu-Shun (557-640 B.C.E.) who asks us to envision
a vast net that:
- At each juncture there lies a jewel;
- Each jewel reflects all the other jewels in this cosmic
matrix.
- Every jewel represents an individual life form, atom,
cell or unit of consciousness.
- Each jewel, in turn, is intrinsically and intimately
connected to all the others;
- Thus, a change in one gem is reflected in all the others.
This last aspect of the jeweled net is explored in a question/answer
dialog of teacher and student in the Avatamsaka Sutra. In
answer to the question: "how can all these jewels be
considered one jewel?" it is replied: "If you don't
believe that one jewel . . . is all the jewels . . . just
put a dot on the jewel [in question]. When one jewel is dotted,
there are dots on all the jewels . . . Since there are dots
on all the jewels . . . We know that all the jewels are one
jewel . . ."
The moral of Indra's net is that the compassionate and the
constructive interventions a person makes or does can produce
a ripple effect of beneficial action that will reverberate
throughout the universe or until it plays out. By the same
token you cannot damage one strand of the web without damaging
the others or setting off a cascade effect of destruction.
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